Re: Issues raised in comments by Steve Belovin from January 2004

["Chris Haynes" <chris@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

 "william(at)elan.net" was quoting Steven Bellovin:

<snip>
>
> Beyond that, there are problems with internationalization:
> what language should the error message be in, and in what
> character set is it encoded? A simple URI would be a better
> solution; at the least, it should point to an SPFERR record.
> (----
>  I remember discussions about this at spf-discuss. I don't remember
>  if there was any resolution...
> ----)
>
</snip>

I started the 'internationalisation' thread, both here and on spf-discuss.

The conclusions I came to myself were:

1)  The barrier to internationalisation support is that the text supplied in
SMTP rejections is only (implicitly-) defined as being in US-ASCII. One would
have to change RFC 8211 to introduce some form of encoding, and it could break
existing systems.

2) The best compromise seemed to be to put a URL into the SPF string (as implied
by one of the examples), and hope that users realize that they should click on
it to see the fully-internationalised error message.

Anything else appeared to need substantial re-engineering outside the scope of
MARID.

Chris Haynes